The Darkest Star Wars Movie Wasn’t Even In Theaters
Did the Ewoks really need to battle for Endor, again?
When Luke Skywalker’s parental figures, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, were slain by Imperial Stormtroopers, it happened offscreen. But in the 1985 Star Wars TV movie Ewoks: Battle for Endor, presumably aimed at children, young Cindel (Aubree Miller) watches as her parents and brother are murdered in front of her. She’s maybe 8 years old, tops. And the reason why her entire family is slaughtered? Because this bizarre Star Wars movie didn’t want a cute little girl to have a human family, but instead, she had to get adopted by the Ewoks.
Forty years ago, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor debuted on TV and delivered a super dark, extremely strange Star Wars movie that bears rewatching today, if only so you can believe that all those summaries aren’t totally made up.
The Battle for Endor was a sequel to the 1984 milquetoast TV movie, The Ewok Adventure, which is decidedly less hardcore than its successor. In the first film, Cindel and her brother Mace Towani (Eric Walker) were searching for their parents after crash-landing on Endor. The Ewoks helped them, and so that was a nice ending to that little story, right?
Wrong! Because The Battle of Endor is here to point out that you don’t even need the Empire to have a child’s parents slain before their eyes. In fact, the motivations of the Marauders, the villains in The Battle for Endor, are vague, and the powers of their sorceress leader Charal (Siân Phillips) were even vaguer. If you were baffled by the powers of the space witches in The Acolyte or Ahsoka, The Battle for Endor is here, asking you to hold its beer. Though Charal has been somewhat retconned as a Nightsister, it’s pretty tough to pretend that anything in The Battle for Endor is canon, Legends or otherwise. (Though, bizarrely, the Blurrgs from The Mandalorian do originate here, proving the Star Wars rule that nothing, no matter how terrible, can’t be mined for cool stuff later on.)
Sian Phillips as the witchy Charal in Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. Just one year prior, she was the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother in the 1984 Dune. Weird, right?
As with the Ewoks cartoon, the Ewoks in The Battle for Endor all speak English, which pretty much removes the cute, constant misunderstanding plot device from Return of the Jedi. It also makes the Ewoks slightly creepier than they were in Jedi; their speech is uncanny and jarring, making them seem more like horror teddy bears than cute aliens. These are Ewoks that you can easily imagine eating human beings.
But because the Ewoks can speak English (excuse me, “Basic”), the movie felt like it needed a weird alien creature that didn’t talk in a recognizable language. Enter Teek, a far less cute creature, who teams up with Cindel, Wicket (Warwick Davis), and an old man whose name you’ll forget as soon as I tell you, Noa Briqualon (Wilford Brimley). See? You already forgot.
Old Man, Wicket, Teek, and Cindel form a quasi-fellowship to take on the Mauraders and defeat Charal. This all goes more or less how you might expect, but the most maddening thing is that we learn, in the end, that Old Man has had a starship all along. The film ends with Cindel and Old Man getting off Endor, because let’s face it, Endor is a hellhole.
Trying to connect the dots between this movie and the canon of Return of the Jedi is next to impossible. In fact, perhaps the biggest crime of The Battle for Endor isn’t that it’s super depressing, but that you can’t really even square it with the rest of the Star Wars lore. With talking Ewoks and incompetent humans, it feels like it exists in an alternate dimension.
Honestly, good riddance, Teek.
Charitably, the legacy of The Battle for Endor is probably 2024’s Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, another Star Wars adventure with kids and a certain degree of creeping darkness. The difference is that Skeleton Crew took the assignment somewhat seriously, and despite its more adult themes, made a show full of more hope and optimism than anything in The Battle for Endor.
Could an Ewok have worked in Skeleton Crew? Can Ewoks be cool? The latest Star Wars: Visions season certainly makes the case that yes, Ewoks can be cool. But, 40 years ago, as they battled for Endor, the Ewoks weren’t cool, or even annoying. Instead, they were the worst crime in all of movie crimes: A massive bummer.
